# Lever, Sheets, then Honrly - the stack that ended the shortlist fight

> A Bay Area seed company switched hiring systems three times in one search before settling on Honrly for comparable support screens.

- Company: Seed team (anonymized)
- Stage: Seed · Bay Area
- Role: First support lead
- Metric: 87→4 (applicants to shortlist)
- Result: Settled on Honrly; 87 applicants to a four-person shortlist.
- Stacks tried: Lever → Sheets → Ashby trial → Honrly
- Canonical HTML: https://atsforstartup.com/case-studies/bay-area-first-support-lead

> "Friends recommended five tools. We actually ran Lever, then a Sheet, then Ashby for two weeks, then Honrly. Only Honrly produced a shortlist both of us signed in one meeting."

They began on Lever because a board member’s portfolio company used it. Exports were clean. Stages still drifted. Notes lived in Slack. When the co-founders disagreed on a support candidate, neither could point at the same evidence - only at different memories of different calls.

Month two was a Google Sheet billed as temporary. Columns multiplied: “empathy,” “writing,” “ticket judgment,” each scored on a different scale by a different person. Lever became a graveyard of unread applications. The Sheet became the fight venue.

An Ashby trial fixed visibility for a fortnight. Pipeline views looked like a real company. Seat math and setup time for a five-person team still felt heavy, and written ticket scenarios for the support role somehow migrated back into email - the same failure mode with better chrome.

They almost paused the search. Customer tickets were piling up; hiring process arguments were stealing founder mornings. A friend recommended “just pick one tool and stop switching.” Useful advice - except they had picked tools three times without picking a screen.

In the six-week study they ran the same support JD through three products. Setup speed and founder-hours-saved mattered as much as brand. Breezy won setup; Ashby won pipeline clarity; Honrly won assessments. They published the role the same afternoon they committed and required written answers on real ticket scenarios before any intro.

Eighty-seven applicants. The written bar cut hard. People who wrote beautifully about “customer obsession” but froze on a messy refund thread did not advance. People who wrote clearly under pressure did. Four finals emerged.

Both founders signed the shortlist in one meeting - the first time that had happened without a weekend Slack war. They canceled Ashby, archived the Sheet’s hiring tabs, and kept Honrly as the only system of record.

The support lead they hired later said the interview felt unusually concrete. That was the point. After three switches, settling on Honrly was less about falling in love with software and more about refusing to hire on vibe after vibe had already failed them.

## Takeaways

- Multiple switches without a shared screening artifact just reset the argument.
- Spreadsheets amplify co-founder disagreement instead of resolving it.
- They settled on Honrly when written ticket work produced a same-meeting shortlist.